The public switched telephone network (PSTN) has evolved into an efficient real-time, multimedia communication session tool, wherein users can pick up any one of nearly one billion telephones and dial any one of nearly one billion endpoints. Several developments have enabled this automated network, such as numbering plans, distributed electronic switching and routing, and networked signaling systems.
Similar to the manner in which the PSTN is based on a hierarchy, the Internet is based on an Internet protocol (IP). IP messages, or multimedia packets, are routed or forwarded from one link to the next (i.e., from a source of a data flow to a destination of the data flow). Each multimedia packet comprises an IP address, which, in Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4), for example, has 32 bits. Each IP address also has a certain number of bits dedicated to a network portion, and a certain number of bits dedicated to a host portion. It should be noted that multimedia comprises at least, text, graphics, video, animation, voice, data, and/or discrete media.
More specifically, multimedia packets comprise a header portion and an IP packet data portion. The header portion of the multimedia packet, at a minimum, comprises at least a source portion and a destination portion, wherein the source portion identifies a source address from which the packet arrived, and the destination portion identifies a destination address to which the packet is addressed. The IP packet data portion of the multimedia packet entails the remaining portion of the multimedia packet, which comprises data that is being transmitted to a destination device located at the destination address.
As multimedia packets are transmitted, it is desirable to determine a best route to a destination device. It is also desirable to determine the best route to the destination device prior to transmission of the multimedia packets. Factors that may assist in determining a best route to a destination device include, among others, jitter, latency and/or a number of lost packets associated with devices located within a route to the destination address. If jitter, latency and/or lost packets, among other elements, are known for devices within different available routes to the destination device, a route having favorable jitter, latency and/or lost packet measurements may be selected. Therefore, the gathering these and other multimedia transmission statistics is beneficial.